MOVIE REVIEW: Ricky Jay pays homage to his mentors

Don’t buy a ticket for “Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay,” featuring the gentle-voiced sleight of hand master, hoping to find out exactly how he works his magic. That’s not at all what it’s about.

Don’t buy a ticket for “Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay,” featuring the gentle-voiced sleight of hand master, hoping to find out exactly how he works his magic. That’s not at all what it’s about. Jay, who’s been a performing magician since he was 4, isn’t from the Penn & Teller school of revealing how that ace of spades got from the middle of the deck to the top and then into some unsuspecting audience member’s wallet. No, Jay would rather just dazzle anyone who’s watching, then bask in the fact that he’s made their jaw drop.

He does quite a bit of that in this documentary by Molly Bernstein and Alan Edelstein – in home movies when he was 7, still using his real name, Ricky Potash, and when he was 14 and calling himself Tricky Ricky, as well as in lots of clips from TV appearances in the 1970s, when his hair was below his shoulders. More recent treats include glances at what went on in his wittily titled one-man show “Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants” (yes, that would be the number of cards in a deck).

But, again, that’s not what this is about. It’s a look at, as the title suggests, the people behind Jay – the great magicians he grew up watching and emulating, and the chosen few that took him under his wing to teach him their secrets. There’s remarkable and highly entertaining archival footage of many of his teacher-heroes, including Dai Vernon Charlie Moore, Slydini, Cardini, and Al Flosso (who performed at Jay’s bar mitzvah).

Of course, Jay remains at the center of the film, and the cameras always come back to him. He’s peeked at during private meditative moments, sitting in some nondescript dressing room in front of a mirror, calming his pre-show nerves by repeatedly shuffling and fanning a deck of cards. “Practice, to me,” he says at one point, “was never anything but pleasure.” But he also takes many opportunities to quietly yet enthusiastically open up about and pay homage to those important men in his life, and to rue the fact that the style of personal mentoring he was privileged to receive is likely gone. His easygoing manner of talking here is quite different from the raconteur-like approach of patter he delivers on the stage. But no matter which method he uses, he remains a great storyteller.

Sure, some viewers might be disappointed that we don’t learn much about Jay, who is known to be a private man. But that was his decision in agreeing to take part in the film. There are a few tidbits from his friend David Mamet, who directed Jay’s stage shows, and gave him parts in many of his films, including “House of Games” and “The Spanish Prisoner.” From Jay we find out that he caught the magic bug from his amateur magician grandfather Max Katz, who was pals with many of the great magic artists of the day, including Dai Vernon. But there are only brief mentions of the antagonistic relationship between him and his parents, and nothing about the difficulties of a show business career. Perhaps the most revealing instant is when Jay says, to himself as much as to the camera, “It really is a very peculiar profession.”